Free software to search windows file system

Cheetah Designs · 11 Mar 2013 at 10:14

I want to search a file system for excel spreadsheets that call a particular function. If I right click on one of these spreadsheets I can find the function name in plaintext but using the inbuilt windows search doesn't pick up any results.

Anyone got any tools or scripts that will allow me to do this?

Windows XP.

Cheers

Cheetah Designs · 11 Mar 2013 at 11:57

marc2003 said:
if you open an .xls file in notepad it's just gibberish so you'll need a tool specifically for working with excel files. i have no idea.

Open it in Notepad++ and I can do a search for the function name and find it.

Cheetah Designs · 11 Mar 2013 at 12:09

marc2003 said:
problem solved then. i know notepad++ can search in multiple files and supports wildcards for filenames. you just tell it what folder to look in.

I just tried it on a folder with 9 spreadsheets in....and its causing the UI to crash.

I want to search a far far far far larger set of files than that.

I am expecting 10,000+ results. All I want is a list of files.

Cheetah Designs · 11 Mar 2013 at 12:28

Sorry what I meant was it goes unresponsive....doesn't seem to be using much CPU though?